Researcher garners award

John Burke, research leader of the USDA/ARS Plant Stress and Germplasm Development Unit, Lubbock, Texas, received the 2002 Cotton Physiology Research Award at the Beltwide Cotton Conferences in Atlanta.

He received $5,000 for the award, which has been sponsored for six years by the Micro-Flo Co. The announcement was made at the Cotton Physiology Conference, one of the 13 Technical Conferences.

Burke, who directs a program that evaluates the many facets of water and temperature stress responses in crops, received the “Scientist of the Year” award in 1996 for his research accomplishments in crop stress physiology.

Following doctoral work, Burke received a fellowship to Cornell where he worked on chloroplast metabolism. Later, he joined the USDA Photosynthesis Research Unit in Raleigh, N.C., where he evaluated chloroplast electron transport processes. He then joined the Plant Stress and Water Conservation Research Unit in Lubbock in 1982 and began a research career on plant responses to water and temperature stresses.

Burke obtained a B.S. degree in Biology and a M.S. in Botany from Arizona State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Cell Biology from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where he worked on purification and characterization of chloroplast electron transport components.